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Widman notes 50th Jubilee as Sister of Notre Dame

Sheri Trusty
Published 8:51 a.m. ET July 29, 2016

It was at St. Joseph’s School that Sister Marietta Widman first was inspired to become a Sister of Notre Dame. Widman recently celebrated her 50th Jubilee as a sister.(Photo: Sheri Trusty/Correspondent)

FREMONT - Growing up in Fremont, Sister Marietta Widman was deeply influenced by the people in her life.

She watched her mother serving others and longed to mimic that compassion. At St. Joseph School, the Notre Dame Sisters’ lives inspired her to become a sister herself. On July 17, Widman celebrated her 50th Jubilee as a Sister of Notre Dame.

Widman said there was that human influence, but also a spiritual inspiration that affected her decision to become a sister.

“There’s a human factor and a God factor,” she said. “The God factor was very strong. I wanted to be near him and serve him.”

During her high school years, she attended Notre Dame Academy in Toledo as an aspirant, a young woman who desires to become a sister. After high school, she trained to be a teacher and spent the first 18 years of her service teaching, and eventually serving as principal, in American schools, including parochial schools in Toledo, Maumee and Shelby.

In 1983, she moved to the Western Highland Province of New Guinea. For the first 10 years, she served as teacher, assistant principal and principal in schools sponsored by the Sisters of Notre Dame.

“It was quite a different experience from the American schools,” she said. “The students all lived there, because their homes were so far away. The dorms were not fancy. There were four girls to a dorm, and they were very simple buildings with wooden floors. I slept in the dorm with them for one of those years.”

Widman remained in Papua New Guinea a total of 30 years. During her second decade there, she trained women to be sisters, and during the third decade, she served as the leader of that program. During her last three years, she was instrumental in the creation of a kindergarten through second grade school for the teachers’ children.

Her work training young women to become sisters had significance beyond the spiritual. A woman’s chance at obtaining education in Papua New Guinea is very poor, Widman said. When they entered her training program, she provided not only spiritual teaching, but practical education in the basics as well.

“Only one of the girls I taught had finished grade 12, so I asked to be a tutor. I gave them an education and religious training,” she said.

One of the biggest challenges Widman faced in Papua New Guinea, a land with hundreds of languages, was communication. Many of the students she taught had taken English classes in their schools, but their experience never went beyond the classroom.

“It was like taking a Spanish class here. You don’t use it outside of school. They knew it, but they weren’t able to speak it,” she said.

The country uses a simplistic, universal trade language they call pidgin to communicate. It incorporates words and influence from many languages and offers a way for peoples of different tongues to have simple conversations.

“It took me a long time to get used to it, because I felt like I was killing the English language. I was uncomfortable speaking it,” Widman said.

Looking back on her 50 years as a sister of Notre Dame, Widman has seen many changes in the lives of the sisters, most of them for the better. The biggest improvement has been the freedom to live in the public sphere.

“At first, it was more monastic. We lived a more cloistered life. We would teach and then go back to the convent,” she said. “Now, we live among the people. We were always meant to be apostolic and out with people.”

Widman said it seems “unbelievable” that 50 years have passed so quickly.

“It’s been a joy, and I’m glad to be a sister of Notre Dame,” she said.